The Shadow Behind El Dorado

"The atmosphere's even more vicious today," Lucy said quietly, having just finished checking over her gear.

"Today marks exactly one week since every inmate was converted to death-row status. Anyone who hasn't been dropped into a Dark Zone by today takes a penalty. It's a kind of turning point."

The ones who slipped through today without a penalty were the ones who might keep slipping through — the ones with a real shot at staying alive. The ones who ate the penalty today and clung to life anyway would be filed under chaff, not worth the trouble of dealing with. That was probably why the guards and the inmates alike were wound tight, watching one another with blades behind their eyes. The air was sharper now than it had been the day they announced the conversion in the first place.

"Anyway," Lucy said, "it looks like we finally get to use guns."

She turned the pistol over in her hands with careful attention — one of the pieces Vladimir Borshch had fronted us. It was only a sidearm, and inside the prison it was absolutely not something you drew on a whim, but a gun was still a gun. It didn't belong in the same conversation as the cheap pipe guns the more technically inclined inmates cobbled together on their own. Which meant we had to treat it that much more carefully.

"Did you check the suppressor properly?"

"Yes. I borrowed the guards' training range beforehand and confirmed it works. Technology's gotten good enough that it seems to swallow the report almost completely."

"Still, don't use it in the Dark Zone unless ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it's a genuine emergency. The second you start shooting, there's no putting that genie back."

"I'll keep that in mind."

I ran the same checks Lucy had — magazine, safety, the custom suppressor — then slid the pistol into the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠holster at my hip. The body armor and protective kit Vladimir had supplied raised our survivability and our firepower by a noticeable margin, but it also meant we had to start accounting for the cost of keeping all of it running.

Body armor and the rest of the protective gear — once it breaks, you're better off buying new than paying for a repair. In EFD, kit with decent repair efficiency was rare enough that hesitating over money was a good way to get yourself killed. And firearms come with a regular appetite for ammunition and spare parts, which means I need to start getting friendly with more than one merchant NPC.

Someone might ask why that mattered when Vladimir's General Store sold, quite literally, everything. It wasn't that simple. Vladimir did not sell everything cheap. Merchant NPCs overlapped on inventory more often than not, and the price gaps that created were nothing you could shrug off.

And that wasn't even the real problem. The moment you start using guns, you start chasing the high. Firepower gets its hooks in you, and a pistol stops being enough. First a pistol, then a shotgun, then an SMG, an assault rifle, a designated marksman rifle, a machine gun, a sniper rifle — explosives, if you're not careful. Couldn't you already see our miserable future, hemorrhaging money on a different weapon for every situation that might come up?

Unless you were a filthy-rich, unhinged veteran sitting on a mountain of currency, firearms were something you were better off avoiding.

I swapped out a little gear and the money drains have already multiplied. Should I actually start keeping a household ledger?

But the situation was shifting under our feet. We couldn't keep wandering Dark Zones undergunned forever. You never knew what theme a map would wear, or what would be waiting to kill you, until the moment you dropped — and even a decade of experience couldn't cover every contingency on an empty magazine.

Which meant we could not afford to get lazy about growing, or about investing in the future.

The familiar cadence of the guard's announcement ran through the hall, and the inmates around us flinched. It wasn't because they were cowards. If anything, their faces carried a strange, private thrill — they were looking forward to this. Of course they were. Everyone staging for insertion in our sector belonged to a Clan.

So the rumor tore through the place that fast.

Had me putting my hands on some nobody from a no-name clan this morning really been that big a story? A handful of clans had reached a quiet understanding and tailed Lucy and me here. For all I knew, they'd been angling for us from the start.

"Lucy."

"Yes?"

"When do you think the most dangerous moment in a Dark Zone is?"

"Well… that would be when you break the silence, like you said, Leader?"

"That's not wrong. But the truly dangerous situation is something else."

I turned a slow look across the hall as the guard's broadcast ticked into a ten-second countdown. Nothing but inmates staring our way, every face wearing the same unspoken promise: you're dead today.

"The most dangerous time is when you start thinking — arrogantly — that you can take everything you want in a Dark Zone without breaking a sweat."

Survive a few runs in a place stuffed with cheap shots and overlapping luck and misfortune, a Schrödinger's coin-flip of a deathtrap, and of course you grow a little confidence. That is not the same thing as earning the right to worship your own skill. If plans always held, you would win every war and every game. If the world always behaved the way you expected, you would be a god.

It doesn't. Every dirty trick in the book grabs you by the collar and shakes you until your teeth rattle. It leans in and promises you will never get out of the Dark Zone.

That is why EFD is fun.

That is why EFD makes you want to put your fist through a wall.

Fun and fury braided tight enough to burn ten years of a life.

Lucy and I slipped through the seams of our assigned insertion gates at almost the same instant. A brief, nauseating warp rolled through flesh and thought alike, as if space itself had reached out and run its fingers over us — and then it was gone.

What opened in front of us was not black dark. It was the middle of a forest, under hard, bright sun.

"Ah."

"Whoa."

We made the same short sound for entirely different reasons, and we couldn't have helped it. Lucy had expected the Dark Zone to spit out another dim, sour pocket of gloom, so the sunlight genuinely startled her. As for me…

A sunlight map already? You've gotta be fucking kidding me.

I poured a silent stream of curses at the Dark Zone, which had, with supernatural timing, already stomped on the gas of its bullshit engine.

"I never saw sunlight this bright, or a sky this blue, the whole time I've been locked up. It's been so long — quite a sight, isn't it, Leader?"

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"Not bad as a little mental-health break. Problem is, it's literally too little of one."

Fair enough. For a prisoner staring down the barrel of a life spent inside — all day, all year, maybe forever — just standing in a place like this would rinse the fog out of your head. If this hadn't been a Dark Zone, I might have torn the gas mask off myself, dragged in a lungful of clean air, and gone sprawling in the grass for a nap.

But that was not an option. This was a Dark Zone. And a map whose theme refused to match the word dark was exactly the kind you could not afford to relax in.

I caught Lucy by the arm — she was still turning in a slow circle, openly amazed — and pulled her in under the trees.

"Don't stand in the sun too long. You won't feel it yet, but a few minutes of this and you'll be fighting dehydration."

"I-Is it that bad?"

I tapped the goggles of my gas mask instead of answering. That was enough. Lucy remembered what you were supposed to do the instant you landed, and ran the ambient temperature and air contamination.

"Thirty degrees… that's quite high. But it didn't feel that sweltering."

"When we dropped into a cold Dark Zone, did you ever actually feel cold enough that you needed a fire?"

"No. A little chilly, but not truly cold."

"That's why you always read the temperature off the goggles first. In a Dark Zone, the digital readout is sometimes more honest than your own skin."

Back in the real world I had watched my character on the other side of a monitor look perfectly fine, then crumple into dehydration after a short run in the sun. The reverse was just as ugly — he wouldn't look that cold, but skip the heat pack and the hypothermia slow-debuff would sink its teeth in anyway. Information you could trust at a glance mattered more than almost anything else.

"Split your water and calorie intake into fifteen-to-thirty-minute intervals. If your body changes before the timer's up, don't hesitate — eat and drink anyway."

"For example?"

"When your vision suddenly tunnels with no warning. When your movement starts to feel thick. Or when you get winded way too easily."

"Understood."

"Then let's move. And try not to let any of the local flora touch your skin."

I hacked a path through the bizarre growth packed in on every side, the alloy-steel machete biting and swinging as I talked. If I had the read right, this was a jungle-themed Dark Zone. Period: modern, or near-future. A wilderness stuffed with strange vegetation of no known origin, dotted with unidentified outposts and military installations we were supposed to push through and strip for loot. In the game's lore, the wreckage belonged to an advance survey team sent to study the place, and to the mercenaries hired to keep them alive.

Terrain like this is a nightmare to map on your own, and extraction is going to be a slog.

That was the Dark Zone's particular cruelty. It would screw a prisoner six ways from Sunday and still dangle a sweet enough reward that you kept walking in.

I cut through the brush with the extra muscle the Beta Fluid had packed into my arms, feeding the terrain into memory as I went. At a glance it looked like we had been dumped into a random snarl of greenery, but every prisoner spawned on the outer rim of a map. Thinner brush pointed toward the outside. The denser the growth, the deeper in you were heading.

Theme and general shape are ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠clear enough. Finding the core farming spots won't be the hard part. The hard part is whatever's already running this place…

I carved the path for Lucy — she was small enough that the undergrowth would have swallowed her — and pricked my ears like a rabbit. A forest this thick should have been full of animal calls, insects, something. Instead there was not a breath of wind. Even the faint rustle of leaves had been subtracted from the world. That exact wrongness was how you told a Dark Zone from reality.

"It's incredibly quiet. Given where I come from, I've never actually been in a jungle this hot — but even I know a silent forest is wrong."

Lucy murmured it two or three steps behind me. I nodded without answering. We were walking through green woods under a bright sun and a blue sky, and it felt like walking through a void where nothing existed at all. What if none of this was a real forest? What if it was a movie set built well enough to fool the eye, cameras rolling in every blind spot, a nameless audience watching us live?

What is this, The Truman Show?

Besides, it was too early to start complaining. We were still at the entrance.

I kept cutting, cataloguing the "familiar" tells through the gas-mask goggles one by one — and then the step I had been about to take simply stopped. Something covering the ground ahead had registered on the mask before it registered on me.

"…Leader?"

"Lucy."

"Yes?"

"How many spare filter canisters did we bring?"

"The standard issue is three, but we packed two extras each to stretch our operating time — five apiece. Why?"

"Because I have a feeling that's going to be a lot less than we thought."